Tag: letting go

The Holiday Season & My Obsession with Tradition

Lauren12 Comments

When my sister’s boyfriend came to watch us cross the finish line of our half marathon, my mom warned him that “now that you’ve done this once, Lauren will consider it tradition and expect you to be at the finish line every year.”  Ha, I’ll be damned if that isn’t a frighteningly accurate summation of my life.

Look, I’m well aware that once I do something and love the outcome, I’m hell bent on repeating it year after year.  You know, to recreate the same level of predictable happiness that I attained the time before.  And there is no time that I’m more determined to be repetitive than during the holidays.  I can’t help it, it’s such a special time of the year and I’m deathly afraid of changing things up, for fear of disrupting my own vision of how things should be.  Plus the holidays totally cater to tradition, making it just that much easier to convince myself that things MUST be the same way they were last year.

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But the thing is, and I’m just sloooowly realizing it, is that things DON’T have to be the same to be good and changing things up just creates opportunity for NEW good experiences.  Take Thanksgiving for instance.  Every year, we run a Turkey Trot.  This year, we didn’t.  And can I tell you what a HUGE RELIEF it was to just have a calm relaxing morning at home, drinking coffee and watching the Macy’s Day Parade?  It’s like these holiday traditions are so ingrained in my head that I don’t even ask myself if I even really want to do them or not.

So even though I’m still hell bent on taking advantage of every single holiday moment, this year I’m really going to keep in mind that things do not need to be pre-determined.  Spur of the moment decisions are fun.  Changing it up is exciting.  And even if I end up missing some holiday tradition, there’s ALWAYS next year and the year after that and the year after that!

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Are you a creature of habit, especially this time of year?

Are there any holiday traditions you CAN’T go without?

On Letting Go

Lauren1 Comment

Sometimes I get in these ruts of overthinking things and maybe caring too much about stuff.  I blame my incessant need to have the future overly planned out (hello, control issues!), but at times it gets to be more than I can handle.  Ahem, an example.

This weekend we’ve got Rockies game, Avs game, Easter baking, Easter celebrating, make up and hair trials for the wedding, then come the work week, it’s two more birthday celebrations and another Rockies game.  Whoa!  Already, my brain is like “when will I have time to work out?” “when will I have time to cook so that we have stuff to bring to work for lunch?” “when will I fit in that 4 mile run I promised I’d go on in an attempt to be ready for the Bolder Boulder next month?” “and when will I even have time to go to the grocery store to buy the ingredients for the dessert I volunteered to make for Easter?!”

And I could spend a bunch of time incessantly planning out how to fit all of those things into the next few days, but… I just don’t want to.  It’s exhausting and a waste of what time I do have.  So what if I go 5 days without working out or GASP! have to buy lunch on the fly because I didn’t have time to put together a perfectly balanced meal at home.  I will live and life will go on.  Plus all those worrisome thoughts are just taking up space in my head that should only be filled with the idea of how much fun the next few days are going to be!  And sometimes, feeling out of control can be pretty freeing.

Life is about to get all kinds of busy.  Birthdays, wedding showers, bachelorette parties, actual weddings and vacations are all coming up fast and while my first instinct might be to go into a tailspin of anxiety, instead I’m going to remind myself that that’s a lot of incredibly exciting things to be busy with.  And that I might just have to give up some control in order to fully enjoy it all.

Happy Thursday, you all!